ISIS recruits openly, why can't it be stopped?

The recent news on Indian ISIS sending out a clarion call for recruitment sends shock waves in India yet again, but the intensity is gradually dying down. A scenario that we have accepted as a part of our daily lives, ISIS has become a persistent internet presence, sometimes even being ignored.

Understanding the looming threat on the cyber world is not difficult to understand, but what is stopping us to be a victim to it is incomprehensible.

Not that security officials and the cyber gate are not trying to stop the jihad from spreading online, but the fact that ISIS is much more stronger and organised is beating the best of organizations.

Top recruits

With some of the best engineers and creme-de-la-creme hink tanks from around the world, ISIS has turned out to be invisible. Take the instance of a Bengaluru ad executive, Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who turned out to be an ISIS recruit handling the Twitter account of the group from here.

The fact that engineers and doctors from well-off families also believe in the ideals of the terror group and wish to join them. The nine people deported from Turkey in the month of February, 2015 had a well educated engineer who did his masters in computer science from Kennedy-Western University, California, US, and worked in the US for more than 10 years. One can imagine the numbers who have managed to make it through the ISIS land.

Strong media networking

Online media and social networking sites function in a vicious circle. Even if an ISIS site is brought down, there are others coming up resharing what was lost. Its media arm Al Hayat is considered one of the strongest in the world and is said to have produced hundreds of films, ranging from 3-minute beheading videos to travelogue, historical documentary, and atrocity porn. The latter, an instrument to attract potential jihadists.

While social media sites like Twitter have the ability to crack down on ISIS websites (post James Foley's beheading), there are a number of micro-blogging and social media sites that could not suspend their website. Diaspora is a case in point.

The team said,"There is no central server, and there is therefore no way for the project's core team to manipulate or remove contents from a particular node in the network (which we call a 'pod'). This may be one of the reasons which attracted IS activists to our network."

They rue that the site runs on open source software that divides groups into pods. Each pod is assigned an administrator who function independently. The group said that they have identified accounts that belonged to ISIS agents and are blocking them.

Google too has a system to avoid uploads and re-uploads of videos of beheading and other sensitive documents, but to a certain extent. Twitter too can crack down on the sites, but it will not pick up the ones with particular hashtags. Terror groups take these advantages.

With over 3 billion internet users in the world and over 100 social media sites, monitoring the Jihadis is a tad difficult. However, it is about time that we bring a stop to it.